JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Pills, surgery and an end to a lifetime of doubt. A Jacksonville attorney is making a momentous decision by transitioning from a woman to a man.
It’s a process that he says is just as much an emotional journey as it is a physical one. Carrington Mead allowed First Coast News to document his transition. He's passionate about his cause as an advocate for the LGBT community. But while fighting for others, there was a battle going on inside.
"It's a lot of work to hide in plain sight," said Mead. "Especially when you know you're lying to yourself."
He's no longer living a lie. The process officially began last November with a doctor’s visit.
"I'm happy to imagine the prospect of finally seeing something congruent in the mirror yeah," said Mead ahead of his first appointment.
That was before he began hormone replacement therapy after gaining approval from his wife.
"She was having difficulty adjusting to that and she was concerned about 'well that means I'm not a lesbian' and I was like it's not about you," said Mead.
Kelly and Carrington Mead married as a lesbian couple in 2013. But it was when they first met in 2007 that Carrington told Kelly she was trapped in the wrong body.
"It didn't take me long to figure out by myself that she might as well have been a man," said Kelly. "She came out and told me she had felt like that for most of her life."
Confused at the time, Kelly says she dismissed the idea.
"I now realize that was in so many ways the wrong thing to do," said Kelly. "Wrong in so many ways. I had no right to ask her or tell her you can't do that."
Kelly acknowledged she wasn't sold on the transition initially because she's attracted to women, but said she's since moved past that.
"I have had some issues with that. But I know now I love her no matter what vessel she's in."
Mead's so called vessel has caused him pain and strife throughout his entire life. Before coming out as a lesbian, Carrington was briefly married to a man and the two conceived Sarah.
"It was a little strange for me," said Mead. "It was kind of like living in a science experiment."
Motherhood, so to speak, came naturally for Mead, who has raised her daughter as a single parent. But the actual process of carrying and giving birth to a child, as a woman who really felt like a man. What was that experience like?
"I don't know the best way to describe it," said Mead. "I guess it just felt more like an operational... I just had the right parts to do it and so that was cool."
"For 27 years my mom has been my mom and my mom has been a lesbian," said Mead's daughter, Sarah Smith. "Now my mom is my dad and he's transgender in a straight relationship. So it's weird. It's not really what I would consider normal. But it's my normal."
But how will everyone else see Mead?
He's re-training his voice, with plans to have chest reconstruction and continue hormone replacement therapy for the rest of his life.
“It's going to be rough," said Smith. "I'm actually really concerned about that. I asked him, I was like, 'Can I still call you mom?' And he was like, 'Yeah, you can still call me mom, but in public call me Rusty because it's a safety issue.' And I didn't need him to explain it to me. I've experienced safety issues with him being gay.
Smith once had two moms, but she now has two dads. Kelly, who is now married to a man, says she's still a lesbian. Sounds murky but at the heart of it all, Mead says he's never seen things more clearly than he does now.
"I see the guy I was always meant to be," said Mead. "That's who I see. I see that the guy inside me got out."